Addressing the many shades of skin
When Somali supermodel Iman started her cosmetics line based on foundations in a broad range of colours in 1994, she said she wasn’t interested in ethnicity or race. “The mission statement has not changed,” she said. “It was for women of skin of colour and addressing skin tone.
“That’s different from a cosmetic line that’s for ‘women of colour,'” Iman continued. “In this country, ‘women of colour’ is just considered black.”
At the time, most beauty companies focused on Caucasian skin tones, with a few brands such as Opal and Fashion Fair targeting the African-American customer. Iman wanted to be more inclusive. “For example, a Filipino woman could have as dark a complexion as me. Why were we limiting ourselves?”
Two decades later, the spectrum of foundation shades has considerably widened. Lancôme unveiled Foundation Finder last fall, a tool to find the correct shade for each formulation of skin makeup.
“Five years ago, I couldn’t match some women who would come in. It was frustrating to turn people away, who might have had colouring like mine,” said Macy’s Lancôme counter manager, Emmanuel Macareno, noting his golden Hispanic complexion.
“Even three years ago, we had more colour but we didn’t have the range. It was all neutral colours. Now there are more warmer colours.”
Lancôme foundations now are introduced with a minimum of 20 shades, said Silvia Galfo, senior-vice president for marketing at the brand. This year, the company will introduce some with as many as 30.
Some brands with makeup artists behind them, such as M.A.C., NARS and Make Up For Ever, have been more inclusive from the start, said Vic Casale, a founding partner of M.A.C. Cosmetics who now is chief of innovation for Cover FX.
Such companies have long featured lipstick and cheek colours with stronger pigments, which show up better on women with darker skin, he said.
The foundation category has been slower to catch up. Casale said brands such as Lancôme may boast 30 skin shades, but only five of them will be for women of colour. When it comes to Cover FX’s 28 shades, he said, “I made the colours specifically so that they are one step — about 3 per cent — away from each other.”
“We joke sometimes, a new shade is born every day,” he said. “And it’s true, the world is getting smaller and smaller. People are moving everywhere. You’ll have an African-American marry someone from, say, Japan. Or somebody from Europe marries somebody from Korea. It’s not as pigeonholed as it used to be.”
As cosmetic brands look beyond the U.S. for market share, expanding their shades makes sense. This has resulted in strategic collaborations such as capsule collections by the Chinese artist Chen Man, the Bollywood makeup artist Mickey Contractor and Brazilian-mined minerals.
So-called colour control (or CC) cream, a newer tinted moisturizer-type product that claims to smooth out uneven complexions, has been a particularly sensitive issue, said Aretha Busby, a stylist and former beauty director of Essence magazine.
Especially for women with darker skin who may have hyperpigmentation problems, cosmetics companies “really are not diving deep enough,” she said. “They’re not going to chocolate, or the deeper brown shades.”
Jodie Patterson, founder of a beauty line called Georgia by Jodie Patterson, and Benjamin Bernet, a former L’Oréal marketing executive, have created Doobop.com, an online beauty retailer intended for women with “brown skin tones and textured hair,” featuring mainstream French brands like Caudalíe along with some that are specific to darker complexions (Ethnicia Paris) or friendly to them (Lamik, which does not overtly target women of colour but is led by a black makeup artist).
“When we started the company, my biggest fear was to start an ethnic site,” Bernet said. “It would seem like it was 1990, where you have black women on the face of the product. It’s so boring for everyone: for the brands and the customers.”
Patterson said: “Beauty needs to be out of the ethnic aisle, gone. We are post-ethnic but we are totally pro-edit. There are some specific concerns that I have that might be different than you. I want a brand that speaks to that or that specific need without saying I’m going to package it differently and put it over there.”
New York Times News Service